Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX520

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Features

The bottom and right slider adjust the shutter speed and aperture respectively. Tap on the AF/AE and you can choose the subject you want the camera to focus and expose for.
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The biggest selling point of the 10-megapixel FX520 would be its 3-inch touchscreen. Although it is recommended to use the stylus, we find it more convenient to poke with our fingers instead. An AF/AE option at the bottom right triggers the option for us to touch the subject we want the lens to focus on, as well as to optimize the exposure. It will also track and adjust the focus on moving subjects. This AF/AE option worked in all shooting modes, including the 21 scene modes which we will touch on in a bit.

Unlike Sony's T300, not all the features can be accessed via touchscreen. To sift through the camera's menu, we had to use the four-directional joystick. Switching between shooting modes also required us to press the Mode button, before we could tap the screen for the feature.

In Playback mode, we zoomed in to a designated spot by touching that area, which was a time-saving feature when we needed to check the sharpness of our subject.

Like most touchscreen devices, there is an option to calibrate the display. The shooter prompted us to tap on five small crosses, and for that we used the stylus instead.

The FX520 has extensive shooting modes to satisfy even the advanced photographers.
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What will really please advanced shutterbugs is the extensive shooting modes that Panasonic has included for the FX520. It comes with Program (P), Shutter-priority (S), Aperture-priority (A) and Manual (M) shooting mode. Besides P, in the rest of the mode we moved the slider to select the shutter and/or aperture. In M mode, the minimum shutter speed is 60 seconds, which is sure to please those who are looking to take night sceneries.

Like its more compact sibling, the Lumix DMC-FX36, the FX520 sports an ultra-wide-angle 25mm lens which, according to Panasonic, gives two times more view than a conventional 35mm lens. The optical zoom is rated at 5x, giving the shooter a total zoom range of 25-125mm.

Panasonic's proprietary Intelligent Auto (iA) mode is now made even more intuitive with the touchscreen. Usually, the iA mode can be easily fooled into selecting the wrong scene settings. But now, we just have to tap the subject on the screen and the camera automatically went into the appropriate scene mode. We tapped a face on the screen and the camera automatically went into Portrait scene mode. This is a good marriage of two features and we think it will assist amateurs to capture better shots.

The 21 scene modes cover a broad range of shooting conditions, but what really tickled us was the Pet and Baby mode. When set, the camera would prompt us to input the baby's or pet's age. Unfortunately we didn't have any babies or dogs in our Labs, but we figured that different age settings would affect the speed at which the camera tracks and follows the subject around.

The point-and-shoot also features 720p HD video recording. We plugged in the camera to an HDTV with a component cable provided with the review set to see how the HD video's quality fared. We recorded a short 10-second clip of moving vehicles and the playback was smooth and detailed. However, do note that the visuals will differ on different televisions.

The shooter comes with 50MB of built-in memory and expansion slot for a SD/SDHC card. If you are looking to shoot more HD clips with this camera, prepare a flash card with bigger capacity as the video files generated are memory-intensive.

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